La Ragazza

The first time Orso sees the new maid, he thinks she is a living doll. Not in the dated American slang sense—with which he is familiar because he was once married to a woman from New England (that overeducated and thorny beauty would never have used the phrase, but somehow in her chilly Puritan environs he brushed against it and picked it up like a burr)—but in a literal sense: she resembles a doll. The maid’s name is Caterina Zupancic, and she is Romanian, like so many of the maids in Turin these days, the ones whom Orso hears his wife, Lili, and her friends discussing in minute detail, as women always discuss their domestic help. Each maid is invariably referred to not by name but as either la colf—short for collaboratrice familiare, or family helper—or la ragazza, the girl. This particular girl has a flat, almost perfectly round face. Her cheeks, slightly scarred by acne, have a puffy droop that suggests childish sullenness or a case of the mumps. Then there are black eyes that seem to be set flush with the surface of her skin, a conventional rosebud mouth, and, barely restrained with a plastic clip, an almost inhumanly abundant mass of black hair, thick and wiry, with a coarse gleam that makes it look synthetic. Like the most successful maids, she is not beautiful and not too young. If she is a doll—Orso amuses himself by thinking—she is a slightly battered one, dragged around by the legs, left out in the rain, undressed with the cruel energy of an excessively loving little mistress.

The interview takes place, irritatingly, in Orso’s study—irritatingly because he hates the way that Lili, wise in so many other matters, drags him into the endless hiring and firing of their foreign domestic workers. The girl is wearing a carefully pressed pair of jeans that delineate a sturdy, flat bottom; also a pair of worn ankle boots and a blouse of some cheap flowered material whose large collar suggests a convent uniform. Her documents—reassuringly in order—say that she is thirty-two, but she stands in front of Orso’s desk with her spine straight and her hands clasped behind her back like a pupil at a school recitation. With her eyes cast down, she tells him, in a high fluting voice, that she was trained as a nurse, and Lili nods approvingly in the background. Also standing and grinning in the background is Milan, the Romanian handyman who found Caterina for them when their previous maid quit. Milan, a wiry rascal with rings in both ears, is married but a notorious womanizer among the maids of the neighborhood, and he is staring wolfishly at Caterina. When the interview is over and the girl turns to go, Orso sees Milan slyly pinch her upper arm. Caterina flushes a dull red and moves away with a hopeless sort of slowness, like a penned animal, and Orso, who is a warmhearted, impulsive man, feels an unexpected flash of anger.

For the first three months or so, Lili is enthusiastic about the new maid, who is so much better than the string of disasters they’ve had over the past year, since Pernotta, the faithful Sardinian who’d been with them for eight years, decamped to marry a tobacconist from Bolzano. Since then, there have been officious Filipinas who dropped unfinished any task that overran union hours; a melancholy Peruvian who sobbed through the ironing; a thickly lipsticked Moldavian, brilliant at cooking, whom they discovered to be a kleptomaniac after she’d stolen two tea kettles; a tall, practical-looking Piedmontese whom they fired after the first dinner, when she served a roast chicken with the head and feet intact. Slapstick catastrophes that have almost convinced the small and efficient Lili that she’d be better off muddling through without a live-in servant.

But there’s the apartment to think of. Two elaborately panelled floors and a terrace at the top of an Art Nouveau house in the Crocetta district: huge, and as complicated and demanding as an elderly relative. And though Orso and Lili have no children—this is a second marriage for Lili, a third for Orso, and Orso’s grownup half-American daughters live, respectively, in Palo Alto and Tokyo—they entertain a lot. Orso’s job as a sourcing consultant to European manufacturers requires it. The younger son of a family of Padua intellectuals, Orso has many famous friends. Men love him for his generous, convivial nature, while women are drawn to the innocent, greedy look in his boyish blue eyes. Their dinner table has become one of the important salons of Turin, and their parties—two or three a week—are carefully planned to appear casual and relaxed, in a way that appeals to the professors, journalists, C.E.O.s, leftist politicians, and members of the European Parliament who meet at their house. The food may be simple—sometimes Piedmontese, sometimes peasant recipes from his and Lili’s home region in the Veneto, sometimes Chinese and Singaporean dishes, prepared in Lili’s quick and expert fashion—but the details have to be impeccable with such people. Lili finds in Caterina a true “family collaborator,” an intelligent but unpretentious woman who listens to directions, observes the way her employer wants things, and then swiftly anticipates her desires. A pearl.

Awakening at dawn in her comfortable room under the eaves—a room that, as Lili is quick to point out, is not the usual maid’s cell but a former guest room, sunny and well heated, with a first-rate shower and satellite TV—Caterina fixes coffee for Lili and Orso, and has begun putting the house in order by eight o’clock. In the afternoon, she washes and irons, and prepares the evening meal. She is not garrulous and intrusive, like Pernotta, but as silent and efficient as a Filipina, her presence in a room signalled by the hum of the vacuum cleaner or by the smell of bleach and water which, in the old-fashioned manner, she uses to clean windows and stone floors.

Her constant companion is the low crooning of the radio, set unvaryingly on Radio Maria, the Catholic station. She goes to confession on Thursday afternoons at the Romanian church on Via della Consolata, and to Mass early on Sunday mornings at the hilltop cathedral of Superga. She never pesters Lili for extra time to go out, as most colfs her age do, nor is she man-crazy and continually getting calls on a cell phone. The girl seems perfect—like those legendary housemaids that grandmothers always reminisce about, who came as orphans from convents and stayed for a lifetime, until they were just as much a part of the big Veneto farmhouses as the ancient round pillars that flanked the gates. “Wouldn’t it be fabulous to have her for life,” Lili jokes in bed one night to Orso, who agrees, though he is bored by the subject of maids in general. When Lili gets infatuated with a new girl and rattles on about the maid’s inevitable boyfriend or passport problems, adding empathetic vignettes of miserable childhoods in appalling foreign countries, Orso presses an imaginary mute button and thinks serenely about work.

There is only one problem, Lili goes on, oblivious of his lack of interest, and that is that she’s got a body odor. Not the usual odor of unwashed hair and flesh that one sometimes has to point out to these Eastern European girls. No, Caterina is scrupulously, hygienically clean. They hear the upstairs shower running for half an hour every night. Hers is a curiously inhuman odor, strong and sterile, like that of mushrooms, which makes its way through the aura of bleach and cheap shampoo. “Probably a metabolic imbalance,” says Lili, who plans to suggest delicately that the poor girl see a specialist.

If Orso is bored by maids, it is in the familiar, indulgent way that a man can be bored by sisters or female cousins, or ex-girlfriends who have become plump and unattractive. The fact is that the first cunt he ever saw belonged to a maid—Ida, who worked for his family in Padua when he was twelve. “Saw” is the crucial word; it was an unusually clinical, almost academic type of viewing. Ida, without underpants, perched precariously, legs askew, on the edge of the kitchen table, as Orso’s brother, Remo, a year older, declaimed in a pompous, pedagogic tone: “Questa, caro mio, è la fica”—“This, Orso, my boy, is the pussy.” Remo couldn’t actually have had a schoolmaster’s pointer, yet he was indicating with enough formality to suggest one: labia majora, labia minora, mons pubis, clitoris. Was he consulting a medical dictionary at the same time? It was possible. And leaning back on her elbows, giggling shameless encouragement in her singsong Friulano accent, was beautiful, brainless Ida, tall and blond and long-necked, with a head that looked as small as a goose’s.

Describing the scene to his lovers over the years, Orso has romanticized what he saw between Ida’s legs as a rose, pink-lipped and crimson in its depths, and has added a swirling frame of old-fashioned petticoats—when in fact the girl wore a coverall of postwar cut that squashed her thighs grotesquely when pulled up. What he really thought it looked like was a sea creature—edged with pale moss or cilia and exuding a mollusk’s imperturbable smugness. An impression that was hardly dispelled a few evenings later when, much to Remo’s chagrin, Orso was the one pulled down onto Ida’s small hard bed, after she had invited him to her room to deliver some old copies of Corriere dei Piccoli, the children’s weekly she used to read with her lips moving after washing the dinner dishes.

“Poor thing.” This was the comment of Anne, Orso’s American second wife, the mother of his children, who was quick to take up the cause of any woman against him.

“What do you mean, ‘poor thing’? It was all Ida’s idea to start with. She was eighteen or nineteen—and no virgin. A good housekeeper and a great cook, too. Nobody could make knoederli like hers. And she ended up fine. Married a carabiniere and came to my mother’s funeral in a mink coat.”

“Poor thing.” This was Bettina, Orso’s great love, who, throughout their six-year affair, stayed married to his business partner, Grellio. “I bet she didn’t really have petticoats like a cancan dancer. Sounds too much like Belle Epoque pornography to me. And why did your mother hire a slut like that?”

“She was a brilliant laundress. Could get through my mother’s entire trousseau of linen and hemp sheets and my father’s shirts in a single day. And I think they expected her to relieve Remo and me of our virginity. That’s what bourgeois families did in those days. So we wouldn’t end up homosexual.”

“Poor thing.” This was Sveva, the twenty-two-year-old assistant accountant in Orso’s office, with whom he occasionally sneaks off for a weekend. “So typical of men of your generation. You’ve all got a proto-Fascist nineteenth-century patriarchal mind-set. You’ve made the victim into an accomplice to quiet your sense of guilt.”

“Poor thing,” Lili says, lying in bed. Referring not to Ida but to Caterina. Lili’s small body is curled around Orso’s large buttocks and back like a coffee spoon cradling a large tablespoon, her head against his shoulder and her narrow feet inserted in a complicated way between his big, hairy cyclist’s ankles. It is eleven at night, and they can hear Caterina moving around in the room above them. Sturdy, deliberate footsteps, the rustle of the shower. Then a pause, and a delicate tinkling sound as Caterina urinates.

“Ridiculously loud,” Orso grumbles. “I never realized how bad the acoustics are between the two rooms. We hardly heard anything when Pernotta was here.”

“Poor thing. Maybe she pees in an odd position. I’ve heard that some of these Eastern European girls crouch on the seat—they’ve never seen a sit-down toilet.”

Lili giggles into the back of Orso’s tartan L. L. Bean pajamas that are a yearly Christmas present from Anne, and which Lili makes sure are perfectly ironed. Lili adores Orso, spoils him. She cuts his hair, or shaves it, rather, because he is balding; pedals mountain bikes through freezing mountain passes with his politician friends; imposes diets whenever he gets too fat; packs his clothes with layers of tissue paper for business trips; makes him laugh; unexpectedly keeps him interested. She is the fabulous third wife whom all of Orso’s friends predicted would come his way after a long romantic career of rigid leftist beauties, abrasive foreigners, infantile students, unreconstructed feminists, and other people’s wives.

Lili doesn’t look like a helpmeet or a comfort. She is puckish, mercurial, tiny and flat-chested enough to wear boys’ undershirts, which go with her cropped brown hair. But she has a round bottom that she often slaps and calls “my redeeming feature.” Her real redeeming feature is her combination of peasant shrewdness and a genius for people. She is a live wire, a little clown with a vixen’s face and long eyelashes that she bats hilariously as she tells, in broad Veneto dialect, the anecdotes that are her specialty. Other women—including Orso’s ex-wives—love Lili, almost can’t keep their hands off her, and as teen-agers Orso’s daughters let her kiss them and tease them as they never would have allowed a parent. Important men flirt outrageously with her, as such men do with a woman who will never be available. When Orso met her nine years ago in Hong Kong, she was the sales assistant and sometime mistress of a small-time novelty importer from Genoa, unhappy about her precarious status at age thirty-five. Now with dazzling efficiency she runs three households: the Crocetta apartment; their weekend place, a modern lakeside cottage near Desenzano; and Orso’s family house, a beautiful sixteenth-century villa set in the hills near Padua, which they rent seasonally to Americans, and where Lili sometimes cooks vast harvest suppers for thirty or forty vineyard workers. Lili’s people come from the same area, but they are small shopkeepers, and indeed Orso’s upper-class family despised her a little before falling under her extraordinary spell.

When Orso thinks about Lili, which is as rarely as one thinks about a healthy right arm, he imagines the indestructible high spirits of Pulcinella. The same valiant good nature that makes your throat catch as you watch a child performing with cheerful doggedness in a school play. He married her on impulse, during a trip to New York, because he discovered that, like a schoolgirl, she was carrying in her wallet four colored rubber bands she had bought from a Gypsy after making a wish: to have him—big, promiscuous Orso, with his guileless eyes and irrepressible appetites—forever.

Now the husband and wife lie listening to the intimate noises that Caterina seems strangely able to project through the floor. “I wonder if she listens to us screwing,” Lili whispers.

“No, the sound goes one way. Don’t you remember when we slept up there when the whole family was here before Easter? We couldn’t even hear the television from this room.”

They lie silent until Orso feels Lili’s body relax and hears her break into one of her frail, questioning snores. He himself is wide awake. Excited, though not physically. Mentally. He imagines Caterina lying in the darkness above them, the sheet and quilt pulled up tight, the coarse mass of hair spread on the pillow. Does she masturbate? Orso himself has masturbated so many times in his life to the idea of this kind of lonely girl touching herself in a convent or a garret that the question is automatic, but at this moment not interesting. Sex, he thinks, is always explicable. The real conundrum is what she sees before she goes to sleep. Faces, perhaps; foreign landscapes sketched on black-and-white backgrounds as stark as the rudimentary scenes in Ida’s Corriere dei Piccoli. Housemaids’ dreams: that’s an expression, isn’t it? Yet what do these girls dream about? Is it princes or boyfriends or shiny red shoes or mothers with faces cavernous from starvation? Or does their exhaustion level everything? Orso has never been able to guess. Even the Italian maids of his childhood, with their dialects and their poverty, their stinking villages ravaged by the war, were mysteries to him. Though their bedrooms were sometimes opened to him, they remained little boxes of secrets in the family house. He falls asleep thinking of the solitary girl overhead.

In the spring and early summer, Orso travels non-stop, between Turin and Rome and London and southeastern China. He has a new project, a company that will enable leading Italian manufacturers—a provincial breed he knows well—to overcome their shyness about producing in China. It seems to be the big thing he has been looking for all his life—he who, for all his property and important friends, has never had enough money. It is perhaps the thing that will finally overcome the disdain of Orso’s dead father, a legendary Marxist professor in iconic gold spectacles, a friend of Gramsci who was revered among Padua students. The father who, of course, always preferred his older son, Remo, the lawyer. Orso knows that his father, for all his leftist-intellectual-aristocratic distaste for having a son in trade, had a fundamental Veneto respect for a thumping big fortune. So Orso drums up investors, struggles through meetings with partners from Guangzhou and Suzhou, clocks thousands of air miles on Cathay Pacific, and still finds time to bed Barbara Yi, a factory owner’s divorced wife, as small-boned as Lili. Occasionally, he brings along Lili herself, who trawls the Guangzhou markets for designer knockoffs and charms the Chinese associates with her capacity for endless toasts of Rémy Martin. He himself is so charmed by his wife’s blissful happiness at travelling with him that he politely abandons Ms. Yi.

He is always refreshed by coming home to the Turin apartment, especially now that everything is running so smoothly. Though he never notices domestic details, it is undeniable that everything that can gleam gleams, from his shoes to the silver picture frames. As it did in his mother’s house.

He also notices:

Caterina’s pajamas, on a night when the fall wind sets off the burglar alarm, and he and she nearly collide in the cold entryway, where the air is reverberating with metallic shrieks. They look exactly as he might imagine Eastern Bloc pajamas to look. Biscuit-colored leggings below a shapeless flannel nightgown sprinkled with what look like tiny maroon ants. Her unfettered breasts seem smaller than he’d imagined, cone-shaped like an African girl’s. Her round face is flushed a meaty pink, and slit-eyed with sleepiness, and her hair swarms around her head so that she looks more than ever like a toy that a rough little girl has held upside down and shaken. He presses a button and the alarm stops, and he says to her in the playful tone he can never resist using with any woman, “One of your boyfriends trying to sneak in, eh, piccola?”

To this pushy remark she doesn’t reply flirtatiously, or blush, or act haughtily offended, as other girls might. She gives him one flat black glance and then heads upstairs, whispering “Good night” in a voice so faint he might have imagined it.

And he notices:

That Caterina, la ragazza, uses the family computer, the big, rather outdated I.B.M. in the corner of the living room. Lili has given her permission to do this, even chuckling about it in an indulgent way, as if over a clever child. Several times, coming in from a late evening, they have found Caterina bent over the keyboard. She has informed them, timidly, that they can take a few euros out of her monthly salary for her use of the Internet. What is she doing? Lili has told him that Caterina is an orphan, raised by an aunt in a village outside Bucharest, and Orso imagines her e-mails arriving on a primitive computer in the corner of a Baba Yaga hut. One day, out of curiosity, he takes a look at the sites that have been visited, and finds that Caterina has looked up documents for nursing certification in Italy. A laudable thing: the girl wants to get ahead. But another site she has visited is a strange Christian crackpot chat room, where people speculate on U.F.O.s, Madame Blavatsky, and the Holy Grail. Orso doesn’t tell Lili about this, a little ashamed of his own snooping.

And:

That Caterina speaks English better than Lili does, as he finds out when she takes a phone message from Anne.

And:

That other Romanian maids are prettier than Caterina. Visiting friends in Pino Torinese, he and Lili find the door to a bland suburban villa opened by a stunning beauty with raven eyebrows and danger in her smile. It’s another Romanian ragazza, his friend Giorgio’s colf. In a private moment after dinner, which is served with queenly indifference by the beauty, Giorgio confides to Orso that he hasn’t fucked her yet but hopes to, encouraged by a hint of sluttishness in the girl’s demeanor. “They’re all gorgeous, these Eastern European girls,” Giorgio says. “Makes you remember when everyone had Australian au pairs. That halcyon time. Look on the streets—the teen-age hookers are all Moldavian and Romanian now. Beautiful and penniless and white, the best of all worlds. You have a Romanian, too, don’t you? How’s yours?”

That Caterina’s hands, like all maids’ hands, are purplish from scrubbing. Raw with cleanliness. Her nails are bitten down, leaving red half-moons of gnawed skin.

No one could be more self-effacing than Caterina around the house. She speaks rarely, and—except for that time in the entryway—never looks either Lili or Orso in the eye. She is at the point where she can anticipate the needs and desires of the household: market lists, the arrival of guests, the delivery of heating oil and mineral water. Lili now lets Caterina prepare desserts, including an elaborate pear-and-chocolate torte, and she is becoming famous among Lili’s female friends as a sort of pinnacle of colfdom.

The only one who is not enchanted with Caterina is the portiere’s wife, Enrica, a faded sixtyish blonde, who helps out with ironing and spring cleaning, and has a gossipy maternal relationship with Lili, whom she often lures into her little soup-scented apartment under the stairs. One day, Enrica tells Lili that Caterina is clearly sex-starved: just look at those pimples on her cheeks. The next day, she hints that the girl is probably pregnant: look how much weight she has put on. And what about the peculiar friends who come to pick her up when Orso and Lili are out of town? Often there’s a silver BMW station wagon with a distinguished-looking older man, and out trips the young lady in high-heeled boots with her nose in the air.

“Well, it would be interesting if she had a secret life as a prostitute,” Orso tells Lili one night. “We could hire her outside of working hours to come to bed with us. Do you fancy a threesome?”

“No,” Lili says, and says nothing else, displays no satisfying outrage at Orso’s provocation. He knows he’s overstepped the line: he can say anything to Lili, but he can’t bring women she knows into their sex talk.

“She’s too ugly, anyway,” he adds quickly, but Lili remains silent.

Orso, in fact, doesn’t want to think of Caterina as a spicy maid from a French novel. He thinks little about her, and when he does it is a curious comfort to cancel out the silver BMW and see her as a vague sort of nun, devoted to bleach and furniture and the temple that is his home. Occasionally, when he has to walk behind her up the stairs, he recalls a line from one of Moravia’s Roman stories: “I was trying not to look at her legs, as one does with a woman one respects.”

One weekend in Sicily, after he and Lili and friends have eaten lunch at a trattoria on the slopes of Mt. Etna, he passes through the gift shop and picks out from among the postcards of eruptions a small crude Madonna carved in lava. Black, faceless. “Yes, it’s exactly the kind of tacky thing she’d like,” Lili says, and loyally picks out another lava carving for Orso’s secretary. When he presents it to Caterina, she trembles and clutches it in both hands and breathes out a hoarse “Grazie,” so that Orso feels ashamed at how little he is giving.

Then there is Milan, the odd-job man. Caterina has shyly told Lili how he and his hellish wife, Myrta, run a kind of way station for girls like her, illegally arrived from their home province of Ilfov, how they keep the girls locked in a room and demand exorbitant fees for getting them work and documents, threatening to report them to the immigration authorities, or, worse, to the Romanian Mafia, who will put them to work on the streets. How Milan, with his gold neck chain, struts through the girls like a rooster in a hen yard. Milan still hangs around Orso’s apartment, too, and Lili surprises him one day in the ironing room—he was supposed to be fixing an electrical socket—with his hand on Caterina’s bottom. Lili laughs, but Orso goes and speaks to Milan. Tells him that if he doesn’t keep his fucking hands off he’ll be out of a job.

Then everything changes. It starts when Orso goes to visit his brother Remo one Saturday morning in September, at his house outside the city in Castagnetto Po, and notices something odd about Remo’s complexion. It’s as if Remo, who has a nasty cough and a lingering cold, had been dipped in pink wax. His arms and legs—the brothers are in shorts, stretched out on lawn chairs in Remo’s garden—are pink, too. He looks curiously younger, idealized but not healthy, as if he had been turned into a store mannequin or one of the cheap PVC action figures made in Suzhou by Orso’s clients.

Orso notes this phenomenon, but does not understand—nor does Remo—that it is a sign of incurable illness, of a body already colonized by death. This is Remo, the elder son beloved of their father, the brother who has, as one brother must, done everything right. Remo the lawyer and amiable snob, friend of every sheep-faced nobleman in Turin. A success, even though he lost a bundle starting up an Internet company in a vague, purposeless imitation of the Americans. The brother who led Orso to Turin, whom Orso sees every day when he is in the city, since their offices are in the same palazzo, and they meet in the evenings to smoke and finish each other’s sentences. The brother who, unlike feckless Orso, got married just once, and happily, to a blue-blooded veterinarian from Cuneo with sun-roughened skin, heiress to an estate in the bottomland of the Po, a paradisiacal private nature reserve full of deer and wild boar and horses as friendly as dogs. The popular brother who is a Mason and a Rotarian and a good father and a comically bad skier and a tireless expatiater on the aristocratic connections of his family. The brother who will be dead in three months of a squamous tumor on his left lung.

This is not the story of how Remo discovered the tumor in September and died of it by Christmas—not the appallingly commonplace story of sudden tragedy that explodes a family like a terrorist attack and leaves the survivors groping to realign themselves in the ruins for years afterward. This is the story of Orso and Caterina and how their non-relationship flared into brief half-life with Remo’s dying.

So:

The family, as wealthy families can, tries everything: Sloan-Kettering, the Milan Istituto dei Tumori, an Austrian oncologist who has developed a new experimental treatment for squamous tumors. But there is nothing to be done. So thoroughly nothing to be done that a hospital bed is installed in Remo’s room in the old pink villa in the bottomland, and a family friend, the chief anesthesiologist at the Molinette hospital, comes daily, first to joke and play cards, and then not to play cards, while the nursing is done in shifts by Remo’s wife, Gemma; by Gemma’s mother and sister; by Deborah, their faithful colf (Italian) of seventeen years; and by Lili.

Orso is there every day after work. He has put his travelling on hold, and seems to have endless energy, as if the life that is draining out of his brother’s body were flowing into his. He organizes the insurance and paperwork necessary to close down Remo’s legal offices, and arranges a graceful exit from the failed Internet project in which so many of their friends invested; he settles bureaucratic and practical details for Gemma and Remo’s children; he keeps up a phone and e-mail dialogue with an international circle of oncologists; he receives the relatives who arrive from all over Italy; and he sits with Remo in the evenings. Sometimes joking and reminiscing, sometimes in silence as Remo sleeps, sometimes, as time passes, listening to Remo talk in a sibilant lungless whisper. Remo was garrulous of old and can’t shake the habit.

At the beginning of November, when the city is filled with chrysanthemums for the Feast of the Dead, and the family’s hopes have faded with the season, Remo looks at Orso and whispers, “Remember when we used to take tennis lessons at the Circolo, and I used to bash you over the head with my racquet?”

“All the way to the bus stop. But only if I won.”

“I never could stand you beating me. But now—” Remo pleats his face into a ghastly grin and speaks so low that the words are like the ashes of a whisper, “it’s I who have won.”

Orso drives back into the city feeling that the darkness has become solid and is crumbling: blackness snowing down to bury him like feathery cinders do when Etna erupts. Twice he has to stop the car because the straight road beside the Po seems to have developed arbitrary curves.

When he gets home, Caterina opens the door. She is dressed in the faded black flowered coverall she adopts when no guests are expected, and a pair of slouchy black leggings and slippers. She looks at him as she has never looked at him before and says, “Perhaps I can help.”

“No one can help,” Orso hisses furiously.

“I’m a nurse. I have worked in cancer wards in my country where there are no drugs, no equipment, nothing to help anybody. And I have a friend, Giovanni, who is a physical therapist. But more than that—a kind of healer. I don’t know how to describe it. He has power in his hands. At least he can make your brother more comfortable.”

Orso is vaguely aware that Caterina is talking to him in a far more cultured Italian than he ever imagined she possessed. And that her eyes, no longer downcast in maidenly fashion, are liquid and intense. She stands there in the dark frame of the doorway like one of those faintly repulsive plaster saints or religious puppets with human hair that he has seen in Calabria or Sicily. Their faces are more beautiful than hers, but the expression is the same: tender, yet impersonal, like the angel of death. A terrible lethargy has come over him, and as he nods he feels he wants to fall down in front of her and sleep.

Because the fact is that Orso can’t have anything to do with his wife these days. He is conducting a secret boycott of Lili, though he continues to talk to her, to have sex with her, to let her feed him and discreetly sympathize with him, to observe her taking expert loving care of his brother and his brother’s family. This sudden harrowing tragedy has shown like nothing else the worth of this small, vibrant woman, his third wife: she is made of pure gold. Yet in the part inside Orso that is most himself, the sanctum where his brother Remo’s skull-like grin is now on permanent display like a holy relic, he is full of chill hatred for Lili. Because of her intolerable warmth, calling him to life when he wants to sink underground with Remo. He holds himself apart from her, and she knows it and pardons him, and this makes him icier still.

And, remarkably, after a few visits from Caterina’s friend, associate, lover, whatever he is—this Giovanni—Remo seems much better. “We are not talking about miracle cures,” says their oncologist friend, who was initially skeptical about expanding the physical therapy that had already been set up for Remo. “But about his comfort and serenity. And both are much improved.”

Giovanni is a short, muscular, bearded bald man in his late fifties, a few years older than Orso. He has a booming bass voice with a pretentious accent, and a pair of bulging, hypnotic green eyes. Each time he goes to visit Remo, he is accompanied by another man, Moise, whom he calls a colleague—a tall, distinguished-looking man with brush-cut white hair and an eager, naïve expression. He, Orso discovers, is the driver of the mysterious silver BMW. When, during their first visit to Remo, the two men ask to be alone with the patient and shut the bedroom door, Orso makes a sudden spasmodic movement to join them, but is restrained by Caterina, who has come with them, just for the first visit.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “They know what they’re doing.” For the outing, she has put on street clothes: a cheap black leather jacket with a stylish cut, a pair of gray jeans, and the spike-heeled boots mentioned critically by the portiere’s wife. Her hair is pulled back in a clip, and she seems to be wearing makeup that gives her moonface a coarse glow. If she were taller and prettier she would resemble an action-movie heroine. She speaks with a clipped confidence, a kind of professional expertise that at any other time would have surprised him.

As they wait in the beautiful old farmhouse room that is Remo’s study, with its coffered ceiling and its collection of pipes and Juvarran prints, it occurs to Orso, through the fog of his distress, to wonder briefly about the relationship of this curious trio—his colf and these two unclassifiable men. Are they both fucking her? Well, of course they are. The men aren’t homosexual. Look at the eyes and the muscles on that bald-headed fellow. And, otherwise, why would two obviously middle-class Italians go around with a Romanian maid?

As if she had read his mind, Caterina tells him that they know one another because they are in the same prayer circle, one connected to a Catholic group open to many different currents of thought. The two men have formed a residential community in the countryside near Asti. She says that they also write books on esoteric subjects. Their latest work is about the deeper meaning of the Tower of Babel.

We are in the hands of servants and charlatans, Orso thinks. Faith healers and cultists. How much more desperate can I get?

Yet, strangely enough, he feels at peace sitting there with Caterina. Permitted for a minute to take refuge from all the frantic scrambling for his brother’s—for everyone’s—survival; to freeze for a moment his awareness of the emblem of despair pinned like a corsage beside his brother’s heart.

Afterward, when he hears that Remo has been able to breathe more easily, has passed hours with less morphine, and has taken a few sips of vegetable purée, Orso experiences an extravagant sense of gratitude, which he has never felt before, swelling him like a balloon. An imperial gratitude, which makes him want to heap the two men and Caterina with largesse, treasures, half a kingdom.

“We don’t do this for money,” Caterina says. “And I shouldn’t say ‘we.’ I haven’t done anything.” She repeats this as he is driving her back into the city, after they have guided her friends in their silver car to the turnoff for the town near the edge of the Langhe where they live. Remo was sleeping when they left. After a respectful goodbye to Remo’s wife, Caterina and the two men conferred briefly in the driveway of Remo’s house, then kissed each other ceremoniously on the cheek.

“My friends say they can come twice a week, if that is all right,” Caterina continues. “Your brother needs help to keep his muscles from atrophy.”

Rage comes over Orso as abruptly as if a red cloak had dropped over his eyes. In his mind he sees Remo as he is now, as he has been trying not to see him: skeletal, his skin no longer pink but bronzed from liver dysfunction, like a thousand-year-old body found in a peat bog.

“Keep him from atrophy?” he shouts. “He’s dead already! Did you see him? Did you touch him? It’s not for two faggot idiot defrocked-priest assholes to judge whether to keep him alive! It’s not for you, you stupid bitch! He weighs forty-five kilos!” He hears himself screaming this at her in a thin breaking voice, and he feels the steering wheel vibrate in his frantic grip as the car swerves. But Caterina, next to him, makes no movement of alarm.

He pulls the car over to the side of the road and stops. It is late on a dark November afternoon, and they are on the two-lane state road between Castagnetto and Turin, in a dilapidated zone of small roadside shops and bars and ugly modern apartments and all the melancholy detritus of provincial life. An old woman sweeping a balcony pauses to give the expensive automobile a suspicious look.

It is the area where the Army of Savoy broke through the French lines during the siege of 1706, a fact that Orso knows only because Remo, amateur historian, used to lecture him about troop dispositions and how corpses poisoned the river. Orso can still hear in his mind his brother’s bass rumble, the way fashionable obscenities invaded his declarations on historical theory, architecture, and wines (“That remodelled Juvarran façade is a cocksucking piece of shit”). He can imagine Remo as he almost always was at this hour on weekends: ensconced with friends in the cozy sitting room that seemed like an emblem of his happy marriage, sipping a Barbaresco grown by yet another of his friends, boring everyone with his amiable monologues, and punctuating his speech with theatrical flourishes of the cigarettes that would eventually kill him.

The pain Orso feels at these thoughts is unbelievable. So physical he thinks for a moment that he is having a heart attack. He has always been a hypochondriac. Now for a minute he thinks he is going to die, and he realizes how ironic it is that he is going to beat the intensely competitive Remo at his own game. He can imagine his friends grief-stricken but also impressed by a certain feat of symmetry: two brothers at once.

But then the pain fades into the enigmatic problem of grief. Of having to live and stay behind. And he is sitting with the motor running and the car still in gear at the side of the state road, next to a row of recycling bins overflowing with plastic bags and boxes of rubbish. At some point, he has bent forward and rested his head on the steering wheel, shaking with dry sobs.

Now Caterina does several things. She leans over and puts the car in neutral and then turns the key to shut down the motor and turns off the headlights. Then she unbuckles her seat belt. And, pulling up her legs so that she is almost kneeling on the seat, she reaches awkwardly over the gearbox and with a certain difficulty puts her arms around him.

She says nothing, and when Orso later hazily remembers the moment he has an impression only of silence made palpable. Silence as a living element, mixed with the feeling of the cold leather of her jacket and the strength of the arms inside it, with the banal scent of a popular perfume that Orso has smelled on his secretary, and with the curious asexual coldness of another scent, of hair and skin, that must have been the body odor Lili complained about. Caterina and Orso stay like that until a bitter comfort creeps into his body, a kind of resolve in despair that he understands is native to this girl. When Orso—out of the ingrained habit of embracing in cars with younger women—moves his hand upward to her breast, she pushes it away with a firm but not unfriendly gesture. And when she finally releases him and he sits back with a long exhalation of breath, the windows are fogged over, as one sees in parks when people have been making love in cars.

As Caterina settles back into her own seat, she mutters something.

“What?” Orso asks, amazed that he can form words.

“I said you have to have faith. In my own language. Trebuie sa avem credinta. Credinta is faith—it’s very close to the Italian word, credere.”

“Say something else in your language,” he asks, like a child.

“All right,” she says patiently. “My name is Caterina. Ma numesc Caterina. I am a Romanian girl. Sunt o fata din Romania. Fata—girl, ragazza. Do you know,” she adds, with a bleak little chuckle, “that you are the only Italian who has ever asked me about my language?”

“It’s a beautiful language,” Orso says blankly, and this limp compliment seems to give him the strength to start the car.

They are silent for the rest of the drive. Caterina speaks only once, when they turn onto the long boulevard that borders the Valentino Park and see the roadside prostitutes lined up for the early-evening shift. Bundled unalluringly against the autumnal chill, some of them standing beside small fires, they are, as Orso’s friend Giorgio observed, all young and pretty and white. Hardly turning her head to look at them, Caterina says, “They are Romanian girls, too.”

When Remo dies, on the night of Santo Stefano, twenty-four hours after a huge gloomy family Christmas dinner held at Orso’s house, many things come to an end. Remo’s legendary marriage, for one. The brave Gemma looks oddly diminished, staggering slightly as she walks, as if she had suffered a small stroke or lost an actual limb. There is the dissolution of the group of old friends who used to meet at Remo’s house. And, for Orso, the conclusion of the competition that has absorbed him since he was born. His extended childhood has finished, the curtain has fallen on his role as a younger brother. Returning home at dawn from a night spent in the various numbing chores that follow a death, he walks in the fog among the horse chestnuts and gingerbread mansions near his apartment and grapples with the fact, like an unwieldy tool in his hand, that he is now the head of the family.

He feels the weight of this at the funeral, in the neoclassical spaces of the Gran Madre di Dio—a church that Remo, enthusiast of the baroque, always detested—surrounded by a horde of relatives and Remo’s friends in a sea of furs and cashmere overcoats. Seated between Gemma and Lili, watching his first ex-wife try to steal the scene by sobbing theatrically, smelling the incense, listening to the tearful address of the bishop—another friend of Remo’s—and wondering automatically, as one does at funerals, when the dead person is going to walk in, Orso feels as if he had inherited the job of ringmaster in a particularly sombre circus. Later, it is only the weight of the oak on his shoulders, the attempt to stay in step with the other coffin bearers, that gives him an estimation of the amount of grief he has hoarded up to consume in private. That and a face he sees while passing down the church steps and through the crowd. Caterina, white as paper, eyes rimmed with red in a way that touches him strangely: an icon of his own mourning. She must have taken the tram from the apartment; no one thought to invite her. Their eyes meet, then brush past.

The other thing that ends at this time is the happy domestic situation at Orso’s house. The equilibrium and complicity—the all-important “collaboration”—between Lili and Caterina begins to disintegrate almost immediately after the episode in the car. Lili is no fool: she knows infidelity, the important kind, when she smells it, and she, who has pardoned every bumbling sexual misdemeanor on Orso’s part, cannot tolerate the climate of understanding that has sprung up between her husband and the colf.

It is not, Lili argues with herself, as if they were exchanging glances—not as if there were the electricity of suppressed mutual desire. Caterina is still satisfyingly unattractive. She is clearly in love with Orso, but then almost all maids who are not mistreated are in love with the master of the house.

But there is an atmosphere of comprehension, of sympathy, of mysterious tolerance, which, Lili thinks, should not exist. Not between Caterina and Orso, now that Orso is wandering in the wreck of his love for his brother. Not while Orso is still, as Lili knows, conducting his secret boycott of his wife.

The upshot is that the girl, Caterina, la ragazza, has to go. As all colfs eventually do, whether it is to get married or because they are lazy or inept or in disgrace, or because they have found more money or an easier situation elsewhere. Or because—and this is rare—they have finished their stint in the foreign country and are going back home with their fortune.

So in late January, with Orso safely in China, Lili speaks gently to Caterina. She tells her that she and Orso are making a change and that they will need the attic room. And because they will have less space they want a woman who comes in by the hour. There is, of course, no haste. Caterina will have sterling references and the tredicesima and all the severance pay that the union is so strict about for foreign workers. And a month to find another job. Perhaps they can even help her get her Italian certification as a nurse. Orso has a friend in the Ministry of Health.

Lili reassures her. She praises Caterina’s abilities and gives her a present: a beautiful freshwater-pearl necklace. “For when you marry,” Lili says.

“Marry?” Caterina echoes faintly, the necklace dangling from her hand.

The two women avoid each other’s eyes.

And in fact Lili soon appreciates her own wisdom in letting Caterina go, because over the next month, Caterina’s last with them, the girl seems to go slightly mad. Radio Maria, always an annoyance, now blasts Rosaries and choral Masses through the house at full volume, and Caterina seems genuinely surprised when asked to turn it down. Looking at the shopping receipts, Lili finds with amazement that the girl is going through two jugs of bleach a week, doing the laundry in solutions so strong that the linen sheets develop holes and colored shirts and jeans are ruined. She uses it on the floors and windows, too, until one day Lili comes home to find the dog whimpering in the entryway and the entire house enveloped in the unbreathable stink of chlorine. By accident, Caterina puts Lili’s favorite black crêpe-de-chine dress in the washing machine and shrinks it to the size of a child’s garment. Reprimanded for all this, Caterina wrings her hands and moans, “It’s because I’m so stupid!”

On Valentine’s Day, Caterina races to the empty mailbox fifteen times, and then walks around with a tragic face. She takes to spending her own money on flowers: big bunches of lilies of the valley bought at an exorbitant price from the florist on Corso Vittorio, which she keeps in a jar on the kitchen table where she eats her solitary meals. When they check the sites she has visited on the computer, they find chat rooms on obsession and hypnosis.

“Get rid of her right away!” Enrica, the portiere’s wife, says to Lili. “All these Eastern European girls are witches, even if they don’t know it. You’ll find your hair falling out, and worse.”

Orso grunts noncommittally. Though at first he objected to the idea of sending Caterina away, it seems much easier to give Lili what she wants. He doesn’t want to hear about feminine craziness. And he feels a visceral distaste at the idea of two women at odds under his roof. Why is it that women can never get along, as they did in harems and old-fashioned Chinese households? Since Remo died, Orso has deliberately spent a lot of time out of the country and has revived his affair with Barbara Yi in Suzhou. “Give her a little something extra and send her away early,” he suggests, finally. “But be sure,” he adds, with something like a twinge of guilt, “be sure that you find someone else who understands my shirts.”

With her excellent references, Caterina immediately finds a job, at double her previous pay, nursing a rich old woman in the Monferrato countryside. She leaves Orso and Lili’s house on friendly terms, and in its usual state of gleaming orderliness, especially the attic room, which looks as if it had never been lived in. As is correct, she leaves behind her uniforms, both formal and the coveralls for dirty work. The only other things she leaves behind are the black lava Madonna that Orso gave her and the pearl necklace from Lili, both of which are placed in the center of the attic-room desk.

Thirteen months later, Orso encounters Caterina’s friend Giovanni the Healer (so Orso thinks of him) in a parking lot. They are outside one of the huge chain sporting-goods stores on the periphery of the city, where Orso has gone to shop for skis at a clearance sale. Giovanni, bald and muscular as ever, is loading a shiny new racing bike into the back of the familiar silver BMW. They greet each other, and Orso winces inwardly at the excessive, vaguely sacerdotal sympathy in the booming voice of the other man, who is wearing a colorful polo shirt and tight jeans that show off his boxy thighs, and who continues to affect an upper-class accent. Unwillingly, Orso allows himself to be embraced, to be addressed with the intimate tu. In the process, he has to admit that there is some unusual element, some power, in Giovanni’s touch.

Orso asks for news of Caterina, and Giovanni informs him that the old woman in Monferrato was so disagreeable that Caterina left the job after a few months, took part-time unregistered work in clinics here and there, and then disappeared from view. He and his dear friends in the sacred community, as he calls them, have heard nothing further. He knows that she was having some trouble with her documents. She may have had to go back to Romania. Giovanni does not seem overly concerned. “A sweet girl,” he says, with an unmistakable note of condescension, and then asks Orso whether he and Lili might not enjoy attending a special alternative Easter celebration out at the community center.

Driving home, having extricated himself by giving a large Easter contribution to Giovanni, who is no longer shy about taking money, Orso reflects that Caterina, of all the people he has ever known, is the most alone—without friends, without family, and not even cared for by the charismatic cult that everyone had assumed absorbed strays like her. Giovanni and the others, he thinks, would have taken part of her modest salary, and probably used her indifferently for sex, before letting her go in favor of prettier girls or richer prey.

And yet Caterina had brought what was best, what was genuinely divine among all the dross in Giovanni, to help Remo. She had brought comfort to Orso’s brother, who would hardly have recognized her face, and she had held Orso in her arms. All for nothing, or for the kind of love that in its extreme humility expects no return. For a minute, driving along, he feels hot and cold with shame at the way he treated her. But then he seems to hear Remo’s voice, as he does quite often these days, oracular, slightly pompous, saying things he never said but which sound like him: “What more could you have done, after all, old man? And in the end, from where I am, does it matter?”

Still, he finds himself wondering about Caterina, long after Lili has found an excellent pair of Peruvian girls, sisters, to come in alternately, morning and evening. The attic room has been turned into a computer room, and Orso and Lili are, in fact, much more tranquil now that they are alone in the house at night.

Maids, even the most feckless, are always reappearing on the scene, whether they are asking for new references or sending scribbled greetings on postcards from seaside resorts. But never a word comes from Caterina, and the completeness of her disappearance is a demonstration, Orso thinks, of how the humble of the world can sink from view. He pictures her in a convent somewhere, or in a nightmarish Romanian hospital, caring for incurables, who in the democracy of their misery look passionately on her plain face. Sometimes, driving past the prostitutes along the park road, he feels a thrilled apprehension at the idea that he might see her among them, though these pitiable girls are very young, almost children, and far prettier than Caterina.

And on Thursday afternoons, when he crosses the city and passes tram stops crowded with foreign colfs of all colors celebrating their afternoon off, he sometimes thinks he sees a round, flat face, a doll’s stiff figure, a crown of too thick hair. Likewise at night, returning home with Lili, from a dinner or a party, he studies the constellation of attic lights twinkling under the low Turin skies. At these moments he feels himself recalling her words in the idle persistent way that one jingles loose change in one’s pocket: Ma numesc Caterina. Fata. Ragazza. Credinta. Faith. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.